Empire of the Fallen, page 28
Foster made his grumbling, throat-clearing noise that he often did when he found a course of action disagreeable. ‘You sound like Kessler. He said the same thing. I don’t like being indirect, Lex. It doesn’t suit me.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to suck it up,’ White said, nearly snapping. ‘A vote of no confidence will carry, but it won’t be easy. If it was going to be easy, I would have just called for it myself.’
‘What’s changed?’ Foster asked. ‘Why will it work now when it wouldn’t have worked a fortnight ago?’
White shrugged. ‘After the Ascendancy War concluded, she could do no wrong. People were relieved. They just wanted it to stop, and they didn’t care how. Being nuked from orbit will do that. When the war came to an end, those who complained about the armistice, about how goddamn shady it all was—well, they were drowned out by the relief. Constance’s approval rating soared.’
‘And now it’s in the doldrums,’ Foster said.
‘Right,’ Lex agreed. It was clear he did not much care for Foster, which on its face should have been strange had White not, in reality, been a preening Veigis aristocrat to his core. Why the population couldn’t see it was a source of endless frustration for her. ‘But the Kaygryn Empire is coming. They’ve already started. Kessler has shown me the data. Imperial ships in greater numbers than ever before have been crossing through the Barrier for the past two weeks and marshalling in deep space. Constance is about to be proved preternaturally correct. Imperial forces will hit a critical mass within a few days and will start attacking fortified Ascendancy and UN positions. When that happens, suddenly her policies of garrisoning provari worlds, securing a share of Ascendancy EXM reserves and drafting every able-bodied human into UNAF in preparation for total war won’t seem like the ravings of an obsessive bitch—which is how we’re spinning it. Her clairvoyance will be revered for generations to come.’
‘You sound like you agree with her!’ Foster snapped.
White held out his hands. ‘I didn’t say her policies were right. We know that they are not, and that she must be stopped. The Ascendancy is finished; we must pull the Fleet out now, while we still can, and take their EXM, forcefully, as we go. But we can worry about that shortly. My point is, no matter what happens, she’ll be seen as having anticipated it when no-one else did, and she will seize the upper hand. So, to come back to your original question of what has changed, the answer is, everything. But it’s a narrowing window of opportunity, and we must move quickly.’
The holo froze. Constance, who had started this exercise with trepidation, ended it with trembling, nauseating rage.
‘How… how can… I don’t understand…’ she spluttered, her features creased in utter bafflement. ‘How can they do this? How can he say these things? He knows—he knows I am right… and still they scheme to remove me?’ Her words were barely audible, her apoplexy manifesting itself as a strange, confused grief. For them to be playing politics, on the eve of their utter destruction, was unfathomable. It was inhuman.
‘Take a second to breathe, Ma’am,’ March said, evidently monitoring her vital signs. ‘There is time to solve this issue.’
Constance turned to him. ‘You hear it, yes?’ she said, conflicting emotions of vindication and fury permeating her body. ‘You hear him, what he’s saying? That I am right? Tell me I’m not going mad!’ She was desperate for a witness, for someone to corroborate her. She felt like a sane patient in a mental hospital, unheard by all around her, trapped inside a prison of unassailable condescension.
‘I heard them, Ma’am. I’ve reviewed the data several times. It’s authentic.’
Constance’s heart thudded like a pile driver. If there was ever any doubt in her mind about what steps she needed to take, what course of action she now needed to follow, it had been erased by this conversation. Her resolve, iron-hard even in the worst of circumstances, crystallised to Adamantium.
‘They must be stopped,’ she said firmly. ‘The vote cannot carry on.’
March cleared his throat. ‘We could leak this recording,’ he said.
Constance rounded on him, eyes wide. ‘No,’ she said severely. ‘No, that cannot happen. I don’t want people knowing that I have used state assets to spy on the Leader of the Opposition. I’ll be impeached.’ She thought for a moment, analysing the bigger picture. ‘Besides, who knows how many people will agree with him?’ she murmured.
‘There are other options.’
Constance sweated. The illegality of what she was doing, what they were discussing, was breathtaking.
‘I don’t want them killed,’ she said. ‘Whatever happens, I don’t want their blood on my hands.’
March nodded, unfazed. ‘We don’t have to kill them. Rendering them will achieve the same purpose.’
‘They will all have IHD alarms. Death of User protocols. Their houses will be wired with all manner of countermeasures.’
March shook his head. ‘It’s nothing we can’t overcome. All I need is a list of names.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Constance muttered, turning to look out over the panoramic view of Arrengate. The entire city was stuck on hold, freeze-framed and mute. From the penthouse, the effect was eerie. It was like looking out across an apocalyptic wasteland, silent as the grave, devoid of all sapient presence.
It struck her as an ill omen.
‘Kessler. Tavistock. Foster. Ellisburg. White.’ She paused. ‘Do you know of any others?’
‘No.’
Constance thought for a moment. ‘How long will it take?’
March wrinkled his nose. ‘The actual operation will utilise multiple teams, and won’t take more than twenty or thirty minutes. It will happen tonight, if you give me the order now.’
Constance rubbed her sweat-slicked palms together. Her mouth was dry. ‘Do it,’ she said, trying and failing to meet March in the eye.
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ the man replied.
*
Foster’s official residence as Chief of the General Staff was in an area of Arrengate known as the Palatine, a western foil to the Vonchester Heights’ east-suburban salubriousness. It was an area of the city well known for its wide, leafy streets, gated cul-de-sacs and wealthy, important inhabitants. Foster’s house was a large, expensive, ten-room mansion, ostentatiously fronted with pillars and creeping vines and a wide gravel turning circle. It was ensconced in trees and tall hedges and sat in extensive grounds, set well back from the main gate which fronted the private accessway. Above, small, bird-shaped rapid response drones wheeled in wide, innocuous circles.
Of course, the house belonged to the UN government, rather than Foster, who was simply entitled to the use of it by virtue of his position, and because of that fact, detailed information about the estate was available on public registers. March still co-opted every security feed and drone in the area and subjected the mansion to intense LRIS, but they gleaned only a little more than the public logs had provided them with. As usual, the path of least resistance was the most reliable.
Above, the sky was dark and choked with black snow clouds. Out here, away from the manic bustle of Arrengate’s central districts, it was quiet and cold, the only light produced by globes of soft municipal street lamps.
March checked the latest mission data. Warm bodies in the area numbered in the mere hundreds. Most slept; some worked. Foster himself was at his desk in a room on the top floor. Information about every conceivable aspect of his physiology scrolled across a live feed next to one of March’s colleagues. He, like the rest of the team, was enveloped in full-spectrum refraction shielding, impervious even to the sophisticated security systems of the Palatine.
A third man scaled the side of the building, sealed within a protective audio damper field. The only hint of his presence was a black spider silk and diamond filament cable that had been carefully looped around a sturdy faux-chimney by an invisible microdrone. The cable was as thin as a few strands of cotton, and could support many hundreds of kilograms.
The operative on the roof moved into position slowly and carefully, leaving nothing to chance. With the precision of a robotic surgeon, he connected a piece of apparatus to the lip of the roof, and using his IHD, aimed it so that it was pointing at the window in front of where Foster was sitting.
‘Rapier Three, good to go,’ the man reported softly over the narrowband after thirty seconds of silent calibration.
At the edge of the estate lay a two-man team with a GV98k railgun and a full-spectrum LRIS spotter’s scope. The GV98k was fitted with a triple-redundancy FHS suppressor which would smother the flash, heat and sound of any shot exiting the barrel with an envelope of exotic matter that worked in the same way as a force shield. Loaded inside the gun were two clips of rounds, the first containing an IHD neutraliser and the second containing a fast-acting paralytic perfectly attuned to Foster’s precise physiology.
‘Rapier Four, good to go,’ the gunman whispered over the narrowband.
‘Rapier Five, good to go,’ reported a second gun team drawing a bead on Foster’s wife who was asleep in bed.
‘All teams go,’ March whispered.
The GV98k fired both the IHD neutraliser and the paralytic within two thousandths of a second of one another, automatically triggering by Hypervect interface on the apparatus placed by Rapier Three. A thread-thin beam of directed phase fire punched a coin-sized hole in the window, and the neutraliser and paralytic slipped through before the glass had fallen three centimetres towards the floor. The neutraliser slapped against Foster’s head like two magnets connecting split seconds before the paralytic suffused his bloodstream and rendered him inert.
‘He’s stopped breathing,’ Rapier Two whispered calmly, consulting the physiological data in front of him.
‘Okay,’ March said calmly. ‘Six: inside.’
The final member of Rapier entered the mansion through the rear passage and moved quickly and silently to Foster. He squeezed a few syrettes of chemicals into Foster’s thigh, and the physiological data transformed to a healthy green.
The unbroken silence continued for a few minutes while mission specialists monitored security networks and communications. Then Rapier removed Foster and his wife from the house, bundled their paralysed, incontinent bodies into a civilian cruiser, and took off to a secret SPECTRECOM spaceport two hundred kilometres north of Arrengate.
*
The Vulture watched with anticipation as the cruiser pulled to a stop in the middle of the landing pad. A dull orange light suffused the cold air, illuminating him and a pair of his men. To one side was a squat hangar, colourless in the wan glow. Snowflakes tumbled through the air like specks of frozen ash. There was no-one and nothing for hundreds of kilometres in each direction.
March and two others exited the cruiser and brought Foster and his wife with them. A few moments later, a second cruiser, Foster’s own car, pulled up, commandeered by another pair of Rapier Team.
‘In there,’ the Vulture said said, nodding towards the hangar. The door opened a crack. Figures could be seen moving inside.
‘Sir,’ March said, and he motioned at his men. They moved wordlessly across the concrete.
The Vulture turned and followed them. Inside, Alexander White and his own wife were lying still on a pair of steel autopsy tables, similarly drugged, wearing formal evening attire. Cables ran from their heads. Harsh white light stabbed at them from above. Crates of equipment and machinery lay in a semicircle around them. A few other operatives lurked in the shadows, monitoring vital signs and presiding over pages of scrolling data with glowing holoscreens.
Foster and his wife were set down on the other two slabs of polished chrome and unceremoniously stripped of their clothes. From outside, an operative brought in a dress for Foster’s wife and a suit for Foster, and they were re-clothed in formal evening wear.
The Vulture stood over them, his facial features neutral. Foster’s eyes were fixed on his, but the paralytic robbed them of all expression. The Vulture wondered idly what the man must be thinking. Fury, probably. Terror, certainly. To be locked in to one’s body in such a way was a one-way ticket to insanity. Naturally, there was no need for them to be conscious for what was about to befall them, but the Vulture was a stickler for authenticity. Much better to have their bodies flooded with real, natural adrenaline.
An operative came in and laid a jagged sliver of alloy on the table next to one of the autopsy benches, freshly cut from Foster’s cruiser. The metal smelled acrid and molten. A second operative gave a thumbs-up from a few metres away, the holos in front of him a scrolling wall of data and gibberish text.
The Vulture nodded. The data upload was complete, false IHD logs that would account for the past two hours and the next one. An impromptu meeting of a pair of senior members of the UN Service generated a lot of ancillary data, after all: calendar invitations, IHD prompts, dinner reservations, an exchange of documents and hidden caches of data, instructions to robotic assistants, house software programs, security teams and many other innocuous titbits that would add much-needed detail to what would be a rigorous coroner’s examination.
The Vulture turned to the man next to him. ‘Begin,’ he said. He extended a finger to Foster’s wife. ‘Head.’ His finger moved to White. ‘Burn.’ Next, White’s wife. ‘Drown.’ Finally, Foster. ‘Drown.’
The man nodded and picked up the sliver of metal taken from the cruiser and a large rubber mallet. A woman dressed in a Mantix vest and a grey hooded top stepped forward and gently turned Foster’s wife’s head to one side. The man placed the shard of metal over her temple, raised the mallet, and—
*
‘—and if you are just joining us here at United Information, we are covering the discovery of the bodies of Alexander White, leader of the Human Democrat party, General Algernon Foster, formerly the Commander in Chief of UNAF, and their wives, Zara White and Bethan Foster, found in the small hours of this morning after their cruiser apparently malfunctioned and crashed two kilometres west of the Palatine, and you can see from the feeds there that they clipped the high ground out by the Fenwick Pass. Initial reports from the VMPD OpenAccess logs and drone data confirm that all four are believed to be fully dead, with the grave nature of the injuries leaving little hope that any consciousness can be salvaged from their bodies. You can tune in to live incident control feeds here, which will give you full access to the scene of the accident, and my, you can see for yourself the injuries the med techs are going to have to deal with. The figure at the back there who took the brunt of the fire appears to be Lex White himself, and that pink substance is impact gel. John, let’s take a look at the vitals here; what are we seeing?’
‘Thanks, Charlotte. Yeah, it seems that impact gel, which is actually highly toxic, has flooded the oxygen tanks, and you can see the way the gel is coming out of—who is that, General Foster?’
‘It is. You can tell by the—’
‘Yeah, you can see it’s coming out his nose there, and that is not good; any med tech or VMPD official will tell you that when they come across a scene like this—and remember, these scenes are very rare; usually these cruisers run on triple redundancy, but as we know, accidents can happen—the last thing they want to see is that pink gel in the lungs because it means something, somewhere has gone very wrong.’
‘Yeah, yeah, exactly, John, and I’m just… looking at the OpenAccess logs, and the initial filing appears to record a coroner’s InstaVerdict as “Accidental”, which of course no-one was doubting but it is interesting, isn’t it, John, how far the technology has come when looking at this kind of thing and how quickly they can determine elements of foul play?’
‘Exactly, it is interesting and the kind of thing they’ll be looking for of course is evidence of tampering, but these things, you know, these machines, they’re constantly networked, constantly monitored by other VIs and other machines, so to fake that data, to enter into that flow of information and insert fresh, false data is just so, so difficult, and of course the IHDs which we can see already, no evidence there at all of foul play…’
A SECOND COMING
‘Oh, you still get the usual gamut of fringe loonies and revivalists, but for the most part, the UN is a completely secular society. That’s the way it should be and that’s the way it will stay.’
Former UN President Lauren Plouton
‘Well, that was a fucking disaster,’ Lyra said as Yano exited, thoroughly humiliated, into the ‘Kurwenic’ sun.
‘Shut up,’ Yano snapped, pushing past her, the wretched feeling of failure and embarrassment total. Lyra fell into step behind him as he melted back into the hot, bustling midday streets. Was it her imagination or were the other kaygryn looking at them?
‘Kilo One, what the hell was that?’ Smith’s voice crackled over the comlink. Seka’s cackling laughter followed.
‘I panicked, obviously,’ Yano snapped, pushing past a few of the slaves loitering by the roadside. Lyra grabbed his arm and pulled him back to a walking pace before they garnered any more unwelcome attention.
‘I really hope he doesn’t suspect anything,’ Smith was muttering.
‘It’s fine,’ Lyra soothed, ‘it’s just one provincial priest. Worst comes to the worst, he thinks Yano is a weird, awkward off-worlder.’ Another cackle from Seka trilled across the wideband, and Lyra’s muzzle twitched irritably. ‘We’ll just have to try something else.’
‘All right,’ Smith said wearily, ‘have a look around and see what you can learn. We’ll debrief tonight on the LCS.’
‘Copy,’ Lyra said.
They spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the settlement, trying to glean what they could from simply observing them, but they made slow, frustrating progress. It was like trying to learn another language simply by listening to it. The culture was so different, so alien, and yet so maddeningly familiar all at once—and it was impossible to know if these kaygryn were even representative of the society at large. In the UN, often the only thing that marked two different planetary colonies as common members of the Hegemony was a shared Terran language. Human customs varied wildly thanks to a hugely diverse Earth-bound provenance. If Myaxomon was analogous to cosmopolitan Vargonroth, this place could be distant Bospen, or industrial Voga City, or some yokel Outer Ring EXM mining colony.
